Battlefield and Classroom: Four Decades with the American Indian, 1867-1904

General Richard Henry Pratt, best known as the founder and longtime superintendent of the influential Carlisle Indian School in Pennsylvania, profoundly shaped Indian education and federal Indian policy at the turn of the twentieth century. Pratt’s long and active military career included eight years of service as an army field officer on the western frontier. During that time he participated in some of the signal conflicts with Indians of the southern plains, including the Washita campaign of 1868-1869 and the Red River War of 1874-1875. He then served as jailor for many of the Indians who surrendered. His experiences led him to dedicate himself to Indian education, and from 1879 to 1904, still on active military duty, he directed the Carlisle school, believing that the only way to save Indians from extinction was to remove Indian youth to nonreservation settings and there inculcate in them what he considered civilized ways.

Pratt’s memoirs, edited by Robert M. Utley and with a new foreword by David Wallace Adams, offer insight into and understanding of what are now highly controversial turn-of-the-century Indian education policies.

• The Indian Industrial School, Carlisle, Pennsylvania: Its Origin, Purposes, Progress and the Difficulties Surmounted (Classic Reprint)
• "A Very Correct Idea of Our School": A Photographic History of the Carlisle Indian Industrial School
• Carlisle Indian Industrial School: Indigenous Histories, Memories, and Reclamations (Indigenous Education)
• American Protest Literature (The John Harvard Library)
• Boarding School Blues: Revisiting American Indian Educational Experiences (Indigenous Education)
• The Real All Americans
• Away from Home: American Indian Boarding School Experiences, 1879-2000
• Kill the Indian, Save the Man: The Genocidal Impact of American Indian Residential Schools
• Education for Extinction: American Indians and the Boarding School Experience, 1875-1928
• Boarding School Seasons: American Indian Families, 1900-1940 (North American Indian Prose Award)